[imagesource: Courtesy of Focus Features]

Get ready for the best of 2022 lists to hit you thick and fast.

Let me skip the preamble here and get down to business.

Vanity Fair compiled a list of the 10 best movies of 2022, adding that it was painful to leave out the likes of Aftersun, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Broker.

This is not a list of big titles that crushed it at the box office. In fact, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of many of these films.

Before we get to the trailers for the top five, here are numbers 10 through six:

• 10. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• 9. Saint Omer
• 8. Hit the Road
• 7. One Fine Morning
• 6. Armageddon Time

In fifth is All the Beauty and the Bloodshed:

This captivating documentary from Laura Poitras (an Oscar winner for Citizenfour) is a biography of the artist Nan Goldin and a report on her efforts, alongside many others, to bring the Sackler family, who unleashed Oxycontin upon the world, to some kind of justice. There is an even bigger story being told here, though, one about America’s many failures in its duty of care, from the micro to the macro.

Fourth is Benediction:

This year’s Fire Island and Bros showed contemporary gay social and romantic life in vibrant comedic shades. Terence Davies’s Benediction is a much graver affair, a biopic about poet Siegfried Sassoon (played with ache and wit by Jack Lowden) as he tries to move past the trauma of his experiences in the First World War.

Third is Empire of Light:

The film is a bittersweet short story about two movie theater employees—a lonely and troubled middle-aged woman, Hilary, played by Olivia Colman and a young man, Stephen, played by Michael Ward—making a brief connection as their lives shift and strain in the dawn of a new decade.

The second-best film of 2022, according to the critics at Vanity Fair, is You Won’t Be Alone:

One of the most criminally undersung movies of the year, this eerie and pensive supernatural drama from debut feature director Goran Stolevski is dizzyingly vast in its meditation on the human condition. The film concerns a shape-shifting Macedonian witch who can take the forms of other creatures—mostly people, but also a dog in one interlude—by killing them and stuffing some of their guts inside a cavity in her chest.

We have raced through this list.

I’m proud of us.

And now, the best film of the year – TÁR:

Part thriller and part grim satire, TÁR is keenly tuned into the wavelengths of modern discourse, all of our debate about power and abuse, genius and tyranny…

Cate Blanchett—playing a brilliant conductor-composer whose career starts to crumble when past bad behavior is brought to light—has perhaps never been better.

TÁR is an ideal vessel for her ferocious intelligence and her slight air of haughty grandeur, which is turned up to near comical volume in Field’s wickedly funny—and yet still bleak and shocking—masterwork.

Good on you, Cate Blanchett.

I’m glad we went on this journey together, dear reader.

[source:vanfair]